ancient cities

590 Photography and the City
potentially fractious consequences for urban
politics.
A particularly powerful example of such unconcealed
division is the redevelopment of Los
Angeles’s downtown Bunker Hill area, which
houses a number of billion­dollar megastructures
including the Bonaventure Hotel complex; it has
severed virtually all traditional pedestrian arteries
to the city center. This was to appease the city’s
major developers, who were concerned about the
devaluation of property they saw as a consequence
of Bunker Hill’s proximity to public transport, and
especially its heavy use by the African American
and Mexican poor. Bunker Hill has subsequently
been largely unlinked from the streets outside and
insulated from exposure to the city’s working
classes. This represents an example of what Stephen
Graham and Simon Marvin define as a hermetically
sealed “secessionary networked space,” leading
to an increasingly splintered urban condition,
connecting built environments such as malls, business
parks, gated communities, and international
airports, which are, in turn, intimately intertwined
with dedicated networked infrastructures including
road and light rail systems and customized
energy, water, security, and information superhighway
services. Such processes alongside the
others described above would seem to herald a city
that is very different from that which came to predominate
throughout much of the twentieth century.
It also invites one to disavow conventional
mappings of the city and, in turn, perhaps to
reconsider the nature of the built environment
alongside the geography and sociology of the city,
and indeed the very nature of urban life, the urban
condition, and urban governance.
Gordon MacLeod and Kevin Ward
See also Divided Cities; Downtown Revitalization; Edge
City; Gated Community; Los Angeles School of Urban
Studies; Megalopolis; Revanchist City; Sprawl
Further Readings
Amin, A. and N. Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the
Urban. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Davis, M. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in
Los Angeles. London: Verso.
Dear, M. 2000. The Postmodern Urban Condition.
Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Dick, H. and P. Rimmer. 1998. “Beyond the Third World
City: The New Urban Geography of South­east Asia.”
Urban Studies 35(12):2303–21.
Graham, S. and S. Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism.
Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Harvey, D. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Sandercock, L. 1998. Towards Cosmopolis. Chichester,
UK: Wiley.
Soja, E. 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities
and Regions. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Sudjic, D. 1992. The 100-Mile City. London: Flamingo.
Ph o t o g r a P h y a n d t h e ci t y
Because the technology of photography and the
rise of the modern city coincided almost exactly,
both temporally and spatially, the emergence of
modern visual culture is closely associated with
cities and city life, and photographic imagery in
all its forms is central to the field of urban studies.
From the earliest experiments in the 1830s to the
latest developments in digital imaging on websites,
the art of photography—whether by professionals
or amateurs—has become an important
way that people explore, analyze, document, and
celebrate the urban environment and one of the
key modalities by which the modern city explains
itself to itself.
In examining the relationship between photography
and the city, it will be useful to keep in mind
that photography generally falls into three broad
traditions of practice: the aesthetic, the documentary,
and the popular.
The aesthetic tradition attempted to mimic or
even surpass the preexisting traditions of the visual
arts, emphasizing formal composition, evocative
patterns of light and shade, and the frequent use of
atmospheric blurring and soft focus. The documentary
tradition, on the other hand, directly followed
the precedents established by the graphic illustration
in the popular press from about 1850 to 1900.
Some urban documentary photography was commercial
in nature, producing postcard, stereoscope,
and travelogue images of cities worldwide; other,
mostly journalistic documentary photographs
assumed a tone of committed social activism
and muckraking advocacy. Finally, the popular or